A report in today's Independent on Sunday claims that the UK government will attempt to subsidise its controversial plan to make us all carry identity cards by selling our data for £750 a throw.

According to the newspaper, government ministers have already entered discussions with private firms to flog our data in a bid to defray some of the billions the madcap scheme will cost.

Representatives of the UK government recently said that one of the major purposes of the ID card plan was to protect us all from identity theft. Naturally that pre-supposes that we have an identity to steal, rather unlikely if our data is being sold to grocers and other trades people.

Despite warnings from a phalanx of third party observers which oppose the plans on a number of grounds, the government is attempting to push ahead with the scheme, even though we'll all have to pay £200 or so for the dubious privilege of being forced to carry them.

John Stedman, a lieutenant in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in charge of IP violations, testified in front of the Senate Homeland Security committee that some associates of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah may be involved in copyright violations. According to CNET's Declean McCullagh: 'Even though Stedman's evidence is circumstantial, his testimony comes as Congress is expected to consider new copyright legislation this year. An invocation of terrorism, the trump card of modern American politics, could ease the passage of the next major expansion of copyright powers'.

With the news that losses due to software piracy have risen in 2004, the US Senate this week warned against the dangers of allowing copyright violations overseas to continue unchecked. A recent US Trade Representative report found that Russia and China headed the "priority watch list" of copyright offenses, with Brazil, Israel and Indonesia included among the top offenders.

Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who chairs the Senate copyright subcommittee, made one of the most ominous statements to date about what might happen if unfettered piracy continues. "Before Russia enters the (World Trade Organization), many of us will have to be convinced that the Russian government is serious about cracking down on the theft of intellectual property," Hatch said during a hearing.

US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday asked Congress to agree $8.5m of funding for research into a ground-penetrating nuclear weapon which would address what Rumsfeld considers the growing problem of potential enemies burying vital installations deep underground. Last November, Congress pulled the plug on $27m earmarked for a study into the "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator", Reuters reports.

Rumsfeld was at pains to point out that Pentagon wants the cash purely for research - not to build an actual weapon. He said: "The only thing we have is very large, very dirty, big nuclear weapons," adding: "It seems to me studying it [the RNEP] makes all the sense in the world."

California Democratic Senator, Dianne Feinstein, countered: "It is beyond me as to why you're proceeding with this program when the laws of physics won't allow a missile to be driven deeply enough to prevent deadly radioactive fallout from spewing into the air after a nuclear detonation."

Rumsfeld reported that the Pentagon estimates 70 countries are currently constructing subterranean facilties beyond the reach of the US's nuclear arsenal. Quite how it arrived at this figure is unclear.

US prez George Bush has admitted he does not send personal emails to daughters Jenna and Barbara for fear that his "personal stuff" might end up in the public domain.

We leave it to readers to imagine quite what exactly any email between George and Jenna and Barbara might contain which - were it released into the wild - could threaten national security*. Bush says it's a personal privacy issue: "I don't want you reading my personal stuff," he admitted, adding: "There has got to be a certain sense of privacy. You know, you're entitled to how I make decisions. And you're entitled to ask questions, which I answer. I don't think you're entitled to be able to read my mail between my daughters and me."

Bush is probably right that people should expect a certain privacy for their personal e-correspondence, in which case he must be delighted by the recently defanged Patriot Act, a typically knee-jerk post-9/11 piece of legislation which attempted to oblige ISPs to "comply with a request for subscriber information and toll billing records information, or electronic communication transactional records".

In response to a new rule requiring most Canadians to carry passports for entry into the U.S., Public Security Minister Anne McLellan said Americans may also have to carry the document to enter the country.

McLellan's comments come as the U.S. State Department announced that by 2007, most Canadians will need a passport to enter the United States.

And by 2008, most Americans who visit Canada won't be able to re-enter their country without a passport.

Canadians without a passport will be barred from entering the United States after Dec. 31, 2006, unless they have a special U.S. "laser visa" border crossing card that includes a fingerprint or other "biometric identifier" such as a retinal scan.

The new rules will still allow Canadians to enter the United States without being fingerprinted. The U.S. demands a fingerprint from all other foreign visitors now.

The United States is also putting pressure on European countries to speed up introduction of new high-security passports containing a computer chip with a digital photograph.

Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) today unveiled comprehensive voting reform legislation to make sure that every American is able to vote and every vote is counted. Senators Clinton and Boxer announced the legislation today in a press conference joined by Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH), who will sponsor the legislation in the House of Representatives, and voting rights advocates.

The Count Every Vote Act of 2005 will provide a voter verified paper ballot for every vote cast in electronic voting machines and ensures access to voter verification for all citizens, including language minority voters, illiterate voters and voters with disabilities. The bill mandates that this ballot be the official ballot for purposes of a recount.

To encourage more citizens to exercise their right to vote, the Count Every Vote Act designates Election Day a federal holiday and requires early voting in each state. The bill also enacts "no-excuse" absentee balloting, enacts fair and uniform voter registration and identification, and requires states to allow citizens to register to vote on Election Day.

In particular, the bill restricts the ability of chief state election officials as well as owners and senior managers of voting machine manufacturers to engage in certain kinds of political activity.

Diebold Election Systems, a target of many electronic-voting critics during the 2004 U.S. election, announced Thursday it has completed the design for a printer that would give its e-voting machines a paper trail.

Diebold's printer, submitted for federal government approval several weeks ago, would create a so-called voter-verified paper trail, a function that many critics have demanded of e-voting machine manufacturers.

Voter-verified paper trails would virtually eliminate machine error in which votes aren't counted, says Will Doherty, executive director of the Verified Voting Foundation. In the November 2004 election, one county in North Carolina lost more than 4500 votes when a misunderstanding occurred over the capacity of the e-voting machines used there.

A California court has approved a $2.6 million settlement between Diebold and the State of California and Alameda County. The state and county had sued Diebold for fraudulent claims about the security of its electronic voting machines.

The settlement is the fruit of a suit filed in September by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who argued that Diebold was not truthful about the security and reliability of its electronic voting machines.

Lockyer, who earlier dropped a criminal probe into Diebold, claimed that Diebold provided Alameda County with software that was not certified by the government. Researchers earlier determined the machines contained dangerous flaws.

Researchers said the voting system could easily allow someone to cast multiple votes in the same election. Last April, California set stringent standards for electronic voting by ordering new security measures for e-voting machines.

More than 4,500 votes have been lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state.

Local officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.

Jack Gerbel, president and owner of Dublin, Calif.-based UniLect, said Thursday that the county's elections board was given incorrect information. There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he said.

Nationwide, only scattered problems were reported in electronic voting, though roughly 40 million people cast digital ballots, voting equipment company executives had said.